Ardwick Green’s Secrets: Dalton, Graveyards & Gothic Echoes

Ardwick Green

Along Devonshire Street North
& pausing at Universal Square,
John Dalton is buried over there.

A barely functioning knitwear
factory straddles playing field,
once a prestigious cemetery &

hidden under shaved green grass
Bones –
it’s always eerily quiet here.

The atomic theorist hawks down
from the tower of Nicholls hospital,
& as the day grows old

in supposed rush hour
the drivers cease to notice
the sprinkling of humans

on the cold pavement
as if they were ghosts,
edging

past the gothic building
as it blares the evening’s
purple torch.

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